Vertov proclaimed the primacy of the camera itself (the 'Kino-Eye') over the human eye. He clearly saw it as some kind of innocent machine that could record without bias or superfluous aesthetic considerations (as would, say, its human operator) the world as it really was. The camera lens was a machine that could be perfected bit by bit, to seize the world in its entirety and organize visual chaos into a coherent, objective set of pictures. At the same time Vertov was keen to assert that his Kino-Eye principle was a method of 'communist' (or 'true marxist') deciphering of the world, though this latter tenet was not much more convincing then than now (from here).
Yesterday I watched an early experimental film, Man with a movie camera (Человек с киноаппаратом), by Dziga Vertov. I had heard some things about Vertov before viewing the thing. From the snippet of a quote I'd read, I expected a very strict film. The initial programmatic text indicated the same thing. Vertov here wants the viewer to know that the film has no actors, no settings, and no plot. He even talks about an attempt to create an absolute language of cinema that is not dependent on the conventions of theatre and narrative film.
Well, it was not a boring film. It was not like watching the empire state building for xx hours on end. What I saw was instead a fun but ambivalent movie. There are numerous images of a cameraman in action, we see different takes on the same location, we see an audience sitting in a cinema. All of this remind us about the concrete (and thus not very absolute and objective) process of making and showing images. What is more, Vertov plays with different techniques. He plays with the pace and rhytm of different scenes, contrasting different images so as to create a clash between them, double exposure, freeze frames and so on. This inventiveness makes the film entertaining and I am a little surprised that most of it did not seem dated. The idea that the camera simply "reports" in an objective way is smashed throughout the film. What we see is rather the complexity of arranging and editing images, of techniques, of angles, perspectives and so on. I would say that Vertov's movie attests to the contextuality of images, but in that, the film also points to the contextuality of understanding images. A pure cinematic language? Hm. When I see a picture of a woman at the beauty salon juxtaposed with another image of a hard-working woman, I certainly will understand the intention of this contrast in a very specific way. It is not as if this is "pure" technique.
Vertov's film contains images of bustling urbanity. Trains, cars, streets, factories. Indeed, there is no story. There are no intertitles either. Even though the cameraman is the center of the movie, the ever self-conscious work of filming, a range of different activities are portrayed. Work, play - even idling. There are no individuals per se, what we see is the collective, each person captured merely in what she does, she is just some sort of extension of the energy of action (I presume Deleuze must have loved this film...!). It is almost as the persons in the film are swallowed up by the activities in which they parttake (and that this is the intention). This lends the film a slightly unnerving (but fascinating) quality. Or: there is a totalitarian streak here that renders it with a bitter taste - despite the merry perspective expressed by the images. But merry is maybe not the right word. A better word is ecstatic. I cannot help feeling that this ecstasy of the images is uncanny, and that is what adds a sort of propagandistic dimension to the film.
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